Connect

Menu 1

Introduction

The Forum, the five-year-old, all-volunteer news site in Deerfield, N.H., now counts more than 350 contributors, posts 50 articles a week, and its readers assert they are “better educated” than regular newspaper readers about state and local government.

The Twin Cities Daily Planet, also launched in 2005, just added a corps of 12 neighborhood correspondents to its 100 media partners and bloggers as it morphs its mission to become a “community information center” to help neighborhood residents share, connect and collaborate.

New Castle NOW in the town of New Castle, N.Y., had 60,000 unique visitors as of the first 10 months of its third year. The site housed 3,450 articles and sold $90,000 in advertising.

Oakland Local is demonstrating how well-friended founders can use Facebook, Twitter and other social media tools to hook 151,000 unique visitors in its first seven months of existence.

Meanwhile, Oakland Local is ushering in the next era of community news startups, demonstrating how well-friended founders with high media skills can use Facebook, Twitter and other social media tools to hook 151,000 unique visitors to a hyperlocal news site in its first seven months of existence.

Through 2010, New Voices grants have been awarded to 55 local news projects from a pool of 1,433 applicants. All were required either to have nonprofit status or a fiscal agent. This reports examines the outcomes of the 46 projects that were launched with New Voices funding from mid-2005 through mid-2010. Nine additional grantees, announced in May 2010,will be debuting their sites over the next 10 months.

Simply put, we examined what worked and what didn’t, what made for robust sites or led to disappointment. We offer tips to help other startups and recommendations for Knight and other foundations based on what J-Lab has learned in mentoring these startups.

New Voices: What Works

By Jan Schaffer, Director of J-lab

Jan Schaffer, former Business Editor and a Pulitzer Prize winner for The Philadelphia Inquirer, is executive director of J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism and one of the nation’s leading thinkers in the journalism reform movement.

The Knight Community News Network is a self-help portal to help media entrepreneurs create responsible community news sites. It is a companion to J-Learning.org, which offers how-to information on publishing software and hardware. Both are initiatives of J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism. J-LabTM is journalism catalyst. It jumpstarts new ideas, identifies what works, creates new knowledge and shares it, through training and consulting, with news organizations, media entrepreneurs, journalism educators and others.

The Knight Community News Network was funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.